It's a very, very interesting place that I recommend everyone to visit. I've been thinking about visiting Petra for the last 10 years, maybe more. I really wanted to visit here and see all the beauty. When I went to Sharm in Egypt, I just couldn't resist the temptation to go to Petra for one day and definitely didn't regret it. Petra (Arabic: البتراء —al-Batra, other-Greek: ΠέΤρα) is an ancient city, the capital of Idumea (Edom), later the capital of the Nabataean kingdom. The Nabataeans themselves called their city Rqm (Rakma). It is located on the territory of modern Jordan, at an altitude of more than 900 m above sea level and 660 m above the surrounding area, in the Arava Valley, in the narrow Siq canyon. The passage to the valley is through gorges located in the north and south, while from the east and west the cliffs drop off steeply, forming natural walls up to 60 m in height. Not far from Petra there is the rock temple of Ad-Dare and the grave of Aaron. Petra was located at the crossroads of two major trade routes: one connecting the Red Sea with Damascus, the other connecting the Persian Gulf with Gaza off the Mediterranean coast. Caravans loaded with precious spices departing from the Persian Gulf had to bravely endure the harsh conditions of the Arabian Desert for weeks until they reached the coolness of the narrow Sik Canyon leading to the long-awaited Petra. There, travelers found food, shelter, and cool, life-giving water. Another major Nabataean center was Hegra. For hundreds of years, trade brought Petra great wealth. But when the Romans opened the sea routes to the East, the overland spice trade came to naught, and Petra gradually became empty, lost in the sands. Many buildings of Petra were erected in different eras and under different owners of the city, including the Idumeans (XVIII—II centuries BC), the Nabataeans (II century BC — 106 AD), the Romans (106-395 AD), the Byzantines and the Arabs. In the 12th century A.D., they were owned by the Crusaders. The Swiss Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, who traveled incognito, was the first modern European to see and describe Petra. Next to the ancient theater, you can see the Edomean or Nabataean era building here. There are practically no monuments built after the sixth century A.D., because at that time the city had already lost its importance. At the end of the 20th century, Petra became Jordan's most popular tourist attraction. In 2007, she was elected one of the new seven "wonders of the world". Nowadays, about half a million tourists come to Jordan every year to see Petra, whose buildings testify to its glorious past. When tourists walk through the kilometer-long cool Sik Canyon, around the bend they see El Khazneh, a majestic building with a facade carved out of a huge rock. It is one of the best preserved buildings of the first century. The building is crowned by a huge stone urn, which allegedly contained gold and precious stones, hence the name of the temple (translated from Arabic as "treasury"). The canyon is gradually expanding, and tourists enter a natural amphitheater with many caves in the sandstone walls. But the main thing that catches your eye is the crypts hollowed out of the rocks. The colonnade and amphitheater testify to the presence of the Romans in the city in the first and second centuries. Bedouins offer tired tourists a camel ride, sell souvenirs and water their flocks of goats at the city springs, whose waters quench the thirst of people and animals. The architects planned the construction of the famous temple-mausoleum of El Khazneh in the former riverbed. For the construction of this structure, the riverbed was changed, a grandiose project for that time. A tunnel was cut through the rock, diverting the flow of water and a series of dams were built. The famous rock temple-mausoleum, the "Treasury of the Pharaoh," as the Arabs call it. The exact purpose of the structure has not been fully clarified. There is an assumption that it was originally a temple of the goddess Isis. In any case, many features of the monument suggest that it could have been built by craftsmen familiar with the techniques of architecture of Alexandria of Egypt. El Khazneh literally means "storehouse" from khazan — to store, to store. The Russian word "treasury" goes back to the same Arabic word, but it was directly borrowed from the Turks in the 12th—14th centuries. The mausoleum of El Khazneh is an example of the greatest skill of ancient architects and stonecutters. There are no answers to what techniques they used to carve the facade, based on what calculations and preliminary designs, we can only make assumptions. The huge surface of the rock was cut away. But for this, scaffolding had to be built, and there are almost no trees in this area. In the absence of scaffolding, it was possible to take advantage of the roughness of the rock and walk along it as if on steps, without cutting the entire surface at once. In this case, both the stonemason and the carver started from the very top, cutting down the first step, and then descended lower and lower. After all, it's one thing to mark out a future building and cut it down while standing on scaffolding, and it's quite another to do the same thing while hanging over a precipice.

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Pavel Sindrevich

Level 30 Local Expert

What can I say here - the love of spectacles is as ancient as the human race. Evil tongues say that acoustics were better known in ancient times. And it's hard to disagree with this - the audibility in such amphitheaters is simply amazing

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Vyacheslav Пермяк

Level 22 Local Expert

It's a great place, historical.

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8 reviews